THREE KINGS Starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube. Written and Directed by David O. Russell. Running time: 115minutes. Rated R. At the Lincoln Square, the Village VII, the Kips Bay, others.

‘THREE Kings” is an extraordinary experience: an original and brilliant combination of comedy, action and sophisticated political comment.

Combining style with substance, it’s the best American movie of the year thus far, and if there’s any justice in these things it will win an Oscar nomination for writer-director David O. Russell.

On one level it’s a boisterous, conventional tale of soldiers pulling off a scam but developing a conscience in the aftermath of the Gulf War. But it also has plenty of smart, humane points to make in its mostly light-handed way: from the way American pop culture has conquered the globe to the fact that even good wars carry a terrible human cost.

Sometimes Russell takes his anti-war message to the very edge of an unfair anti-Americanism. But it’s one of those pictures you can enjoy even if you disagree with its flashes of political correctness, its cynicism about America’s motives for throwing Saddam out of occupied Kuwait and its implicit call for a morally based foreign policy.

Just after the Gulf War ceasefire, GIs Barlow (Mark Wahlberg), Chief (Ice Cube) and Vig (Spike Jonze) – all reservists who haven’t seen any action – find a map hidden on an Iraqi POW that gives directions to a bunker where Saddam has hidden some of the gold he stole from Kuwait.

Gates (George Clooney), a cynical special-forces major who’s sick of shepherding around an aggressive TV reporter, hears about the map and teams up with the three guys to borrow a Humvee and steal the gold.

They find the town with the bunkers easily enough and are relieved that the Iraqi soldiers there don’t care about them lifting the loot. The Iraqis are too busy suppressing the rebellion against Saddam called for by President Bush.

It’s not America’s war anymore, and these guys’ priority is getting the gold. But at a certain point the brutality of the Iraqi troops against the civilian population becomes too hard for the AWOL Americans to stomach, and they end up trying to help the anti-Saddam resistance.

But it’s what happens along the way that makes “Three Kings” such fun and so provocative. There’s plenty of absurd comedy, but there are also some nasty and very effective shocks.

Russell uses all sorts of visual tricks (including different film stocks) to convey not just the surreality of the situation in which his heroes find themselves, but also their mental states. The experiment works.

It’s just as well, because the three main characters – the film gives them a more or less equal amount of screen time – are sketchily drawn, perhaps deliberately so.

Russell’s previous films “Spanking the Monkey” and “Flirting with Disaster” were clever and funny but gave no hint that he could pull off a movie as strong and, in its own strange way, as serious and important as this one.